Vignette and anecdote research

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The vignette research and the anecdote research are methodical procedures for researching school experiences in the classroom, which a research team at the Institute for Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Innsbruck developed through funding from the Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research .

Vignette research

As a qualitative approach, the vignette research is theoretically and methodologically located in the phenomenological educational science and describes an ethnographically, narrative and phenomenologically oriented research method with which the learning of pupils in school lessons in several countries was examined. As an approach to empirical teaching research, she particularly wants to open up the implementation of learning experiences and make experiences of educational activity understandable and tangible. Work with vignette research can be found at the University of Innsbruck, the Free University of Bozen, the University of Klagenfurt, the University of Vienna and the University of Education in Zurich.

Theoretical foundations and research methodological positioning

Vignette research is based on phenomenology as a philosophy of experience, a philosophical style of thinking that goes back to Edmund Husserl , which has set itself the goal of researching learning as (educational) experience and thus exploring difficult-to-grasp phenomena in the school context of scientific observation in a different way more accessible than previous methods of empirical educational research have succeeded in doing. Pupils' experiences are explored in the way that the researchers themselves perceive and experience in the direct encounter. Following phenomenological tradition, researchers transform the participant experience into narrative texts. The experiences made by the researchers are recorded and then condensed into so-called vignettes as concise, richly experiential stories. In particular, spatial, temporal, relational and physical articulations of school experiences are given specific attention. Tones, voices, looks, movements, gestures and facial expressions are significant because they contain things that have been experienced, felt, heard or seen as bodily embodiments of school experience to a special degree. As a “sound body of learning”, vignettes capture moments of experience from everyday school life in which the researchers themselves have had experiences, and condense them into concise narrations in recursive writing processes. This wealth of experience can be differentiated phenomenon-specifically in the subsequent analysis using vignette readings. Neither operationalization nor categorization is the goal of such readings, but rather the respectful description of physical, spatial, temporal and relational articulations of experiences from the school context. While writing the vignette is based on the concept of giving an example, reading a vignette is based on understanding the example.

In the monograph Learning as an Educational Experience. Vignettes in practical research (2012) include the understanding of learning on which the research approach is based, the theoretical principles, the empirical procedure, a collection of vignettes that were collected as part of the pilot project for the New Middle School (NMS) at school locations across Austria, as well as various Applications in practice, teaching and school research presented. In addition to numerous publications, research projects on vignette research have so far resulted in nine dissertations and three habilitation theses.

Learning as an experience

The vignette research is based on a pedagogical-body-phenomenological understanding of learning, which is based on a learning concept of learning as experience. According to Käte Meyer-Drawe, learning is “a phenomenological object par excellence.” We not only learn through or from experience, but learning itself is an experience. In learning as an experience, we have an experience about our own experience. This is the case when the correspondence between our expectations and the executions is no longer given. As an experience, learning has the character of an occurrence: it happens to us and crosses our expectations; it eludes our initiative, whereby we are present in this act but do not initiate it. The experience of learning is something that comes from the other and the other and, like awakening, is active and passive at the same time. We are present as bodily beings, but we do not trigger the learning. It cannot be produced proactively, for example through teaching. The beginning and completion of learning elude us and learning, if at all, can only be measured or clearly determined based on its results. Learning is not the direct result of teaching, but learning and teaching are interwoven in many ways. According to Meyer-Drawe , teaching takes place in the learning of others. With reference to Bernhard Waldenfels and Maurice Merleau-Ponty , this responsive process creates a fabric, a network, the product of which cannot be clearly assigned to either learning or teaching.

Learning sidedness

The learning-side orientation of vignette research represents a special emphasis, a new perspective and approach in empirical teaching research. It takes the side of learning in the experience dimension of the students as the starting point for how the side of teaching is presented and how it works. This change of perspective requires a certain research attitude, which deviates significantly from a distanced observer role in the research process due to the experience in vignette research.

Vignette research in practice

  • In the context of professional learning communities, teachers deal with vignettes and analyze the recorded experiences in structured processes in order to sharpen the “learning-side” view and to further differentiate the learning term via a learning register than is the case in conventional learning theory.
  • Vignettes serve as evidence of lived practice in the evaluation of schools and lessons. They are used as an evaluation instrument within the framework of the OECD program “Innovative Learning Environments”.
  • The vignette methodology is used to develop schools and teaching. Researchers experience the school day with the pupils, log experience data and write vignettes that are made available to the schools as a database for school development. In this way, colleges can gain insights into the experiences of individuals; Identify the facets of learning that are favored at your school location and critically reflect actual / target images that are relevant for the location-specific school and practice development.
  • Vignettes are used in teacher training (e.g. at the ILS of the University of Innsbruck), on the one hand, to develop an experience-oriented and learning-oriented view in students and, on the other hand, to adequately capture the dimensions of teaching experience.

Anecdotal research

The anecdote research was developed at the University of Innsbruck as a further development of the research approach of the vignette research and is a research method for the investigation of learning processes over longer periods of time. The interest is focused on questions such as: What do students experience in their several years of schooling, what do they learn? What do you remember? How have the learning experiences shaped you? While vignettes are created on the basis of experiences in statu nascendi , research discussions about remembered learning experiences and their transcriptions form the basis for anecdotes. Anecdotes were developed based on the work of Van Manen and are understood by the Innsbruck research group as "remarkable stories in which events with a particular impact that researchers are told from the remembered experience are pointedly condensed". Lived experience is transformed in several ways in the creation process of the anecdote. In particular, the phenomena of remembering and forgetting and the linguistic expression of experience are important for the understanding and conception of the anecdote. The research project on anecdotal research resulted in dissertations that are available in book form.

Recall

In the state of remembering, only certain experiences come into focus, while others are forgotten. Because of the intervention of the present and because of what has been experienced in the meantime, experiences in memory are changed. This is not a conscious and willful process, but something that happens to a large extent without the direct influence of the self. Memories fall in and out, are awakened or not awakened by questions or the situation of the conversation, the circumstances, etc. What is remembered and how is forgotten, however, is not a product of chance; Remembering and forgetting can be understood as "structuring experience in terms of articulation and disarticulation". In this respect, remembering is to be understood as an answer to demands and is shaped by that hiatus between demand and answer that Waldenfels speaks of and which often turns out to be a gateway for the pathetic. The remembered and narrated experiences of the students therefore not only lag behind the experiences of the past, but also add something to them in the sense of an excess.

Tell

Telling stories are one, if not the best way to express experiences. They are able to absorb the diverse process of meaning formation that characterizes experiences without fixing it or bringing it to a standstill. In the narration, individual remembered moments of experience are made into language from the stream of experience, which are given meaning and meaning through the words. On the one hand, this leads to a definition and simplification of experience, on the other hand, when talking about it, there is also a surplus of meaning . Talking and writing are forms of translating experiences, whereby experience not only cuts off speech for us, but at the same time awakens the word through which it becomes text. This special relationship between experience and its expression, to which Tengelyi refers in his recourse to Merleau-Ponty, also comes into play when writing vignettes and anecdotes. In conversation as an appeal-response event, researchers become co-experiences. Not only in the word, but also in the change of intonation, volume or speaking speed, stuttering, stuttering, falling silent or bubbling words, in the change of gestures and facial expressions, in laughing or smiling, in the change of the look or a changed posture are articulated Experience.

Potential of anecdote

The anecdote has a lot in common with the vignette: like the vignette, it is a short, concise narrative that brings moments of lived experience to life in a narrated form. Anecdotes should also be concise in the sense of substantial, expressive and pregnant with regard to the lived experience and enable readers to have an experience in the sense of co-experience; like the vignette, the anecdote is not intended to instruct, but to carry you away and enable an excess. Similar to vignettes, anecdotes can be understood as examples in which general information flashes. In addition, anecdotes shed light on another facet of (educational) experiences. They also shed light on what and how schoolchildren tell of their experiences and describe them as remembered, how they reflect on and evaluate them from today's perspective.

Anecdotal research in practice

As multi-faceted examples, anecdotes open up a space for reflection on one's own practice. They show the diversity of teaching and learning and provide an insight into the learning-side effects of educational interventions. Anecdotes are suitable as an impulse for reflection for students in training, for teachers in further and advanced training and as food for thought and a basis for discussion for school development.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Schratz: Exploring quality learning beyond teaching. In U. Steffens, R. Messner (Hrsg.): Teaching quality: concepts and balances of successful teaching and learning. Vol. 3 of Fundamentals of the Quality of School. Münster: Waxmann 2018, pp. 317-332.
  2. ↑ Evi Agostini, Michael Schratz, Erika Risse: Thinking on the learning side - teaching successfully. Personalized teaching and learning in school. Hamburg: AOL 2018.
  3. ↑ Bernhard Waldenfels: fault lines of experience: phenomenology - psychoanalysis - phenomenology. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2002.
  4. ↑ Käte Meyer-Drawe: body and sociality. Phenomenological contributions to a pedagogical theory of intersubjectivity. 3. corr. Edition Munich: Fink 2001.
  5. ^ Ton Beekman: Hand in hand with Sascha. About fireflies, Grandma Millie and some other room stories. In the appendix: About participating experience. In: W. Lippitz, K. Meyer-Drawe (eds.): Child and World. Phenomenological studies in pedagogy. 2., through Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum 1987, pp. 11-25.
  6. ↑ Michael Schratz, Johanna F. Schwarz, Tanja Westfall-Greiter: On the way to a theory learning side of teaching. In: W. Meseth, M. Proske, FO Radtke (Ed.): Theories of teaching in research and teaching. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2011, pp. 103–115.
  7. ↑ Wilfried Lippitz : Difference and Strangeness. Phenomenological conceptions of human learning - didactic consequences. 3rd edition Frankfurt am Main: Lang 2003.
  8. ^ Günther Buck: Learning and experience - Epagogik: on the concept of didactic induction. 3rd, exp. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1989.
  9. ↑ Michael Schratz, Johanna F., Tanja Westfall-Greiter: Learning as an educational experience. Vignettes in practical research. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2012.
  10. ^ Günther Buck: Learning and experience - Epagogik: on the concept of didactic induction. 3rd, exp. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1989.
  11. ^ Käte Meyer-Drawe: Discourses of learning. Munich: Fink 2008.
  12. ^ Käte Meyer-Drawe: To the experience of learning. A phenomenological sketch. In: Santalka 18 (3), 2010. Here: p. 6f.
  13. ^ Käte Meyer-Drawe: Discourses of learning. Munich: Fink 2008.
  14. ↑ Michael Schratz: Exploring quality learning beyond teaching. In U. Steffens, R. Messner (Hrsg.): Teaching quality: concepts and balances of successful teaching and learning. Vol. 3 of Fundamentals of the Quality of School. Münster: Waxmann 2018, pp. 317-332.
  15. ↑ Evi Agostini, Michael Schratz, Erika Risse: Thinking on the learning side - teaching successfully. Personalized teaching and learning in school. Hamburg: AOL 2018.
  16. ↑ Tanja Westfall-Greiter, Christoph Hofbauer: Unlocking the learner: Sharpening the learning-side view. In: Lernende Schule (workshop), 20 (80), 2017, 1–16.
  17. ↑ Tanja Westfall-Greiter, Helga, Dienhofer: From Evidence-Based to Evidence Generating Practice: Implications for Education Research in the Context of Innovation. In M. Ammann, T. Westfall-Greiter & M. Schratz (Eds.): Experience-Oriented Educational Research, Vol. 3. Interpreting Experiences - Experiencing Interpretations: Vignettes and Anecdotes as Research, Evaluation and Mentoring Tool. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017, pp. 77–94.
  18. ^ Max van Manen: Researching lived experience. Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press 1990.
  19. ↑ Max van Manen: Writing in the dark. Phenomenological studies in interpretive inquiry. London, Ont .: Althouse Press 2002.
  20. ↑ Gabriele Rathgeb, Silvia Krenn & Michael Schratz: Helping experiences to express. In: M. Ammann, T. Westfall-Greiter & M. Schratz (eds.): Interpret experiences - experience interpretations. Experiental Vignettes and Anecdotes as Research, Evaluation and Mentoring Tool. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2017. pp. 125–151. Here: p. 130.
  21. ↑ Silvia Krenn: Being moved in the learning process. About the formative effect of school as a space for experience. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2017.
  22. ↑ Gabriele Rathgeb: Desire for knowledge. About the importance of curiosity and curiosity for learning. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2019.
  23. ↑ Gabriele Rathgeb, Silvia Krenn & Michael Schratz: Helping experiences to express. In: M. Ammann, T. Westfall-Greiter & M. Schratz (eds.): Interpret experiences - experience interpretations. Experiental Vignettes and Anecdotes as Research, Evaluation and Mentoring Tool. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2017. pp. 125–151. Here: p. 133.
  24. ↑ Käte Meyer-Drawe: People in the mirror of their machines. 2nd edition Munich: Fink 2007. Here: p. 161.
  25. ^ Bernhard Waldenfels: The bodily self. Lectures on the phenomenology of the body. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000. Here: p. 299f.
  26. ^ Bernhard Waldenfels: Answer register. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2007.
  27. ↑ Gabriele Rathgeb, Silvia Krenn & Michael Schratz: Helping experiences to express. In: M. Ammann, T. Westfall-Greiter & M. Schratz (eds.): Interpret experiences - experience interpretations. Experiental Vignettes and Anecdotes as Research, Evaluation and Mentoring Tool. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2017. pp. 125–151. Here: p. 135f.
  28. ↑ László Tengelyi, László: Experience and Expression. Phenomenology in upheaval in Husserl and his successors. Dordrecht, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer 2007 (Phaenomenologica, Vol. 180). Here: p. 17 and P. 303f.
  29. ↑ László Tengelyi: Experience and Expression. Phenomenology in upheaval in Husserl and his successors. Dordrecht, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer 2007 (Phaenomenologica, Vol. 180). Here: p. 203.
  30. ^ Käte Meyer-Drawe: Foreword. In: M. Schratz, JF Schwarz & T. Westfall-Greiter: Learning as an educational experience. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2012. pp. 11–15, here: p. 15.
  31. ↑ Silvia Krenn, Gabriele Rathgeb & Michael Schratz: What works further and how? Educational experiences from a learning perspective. In: Learning School. For the practice of educational school development, 80, 2017, 40–43.